Alan Weiss’s Monday Morning Memo® – 3/12/12
March 12, 2012—Issue #129
This week’s focus point: Almost every good intention, taken to extremes, has an invidious dimension that undermines us. Many people want to help others so much that they wind up in an extreme position, denying themselves, sacrificing their own objectives, surrendering their days and even their dreams. I call this a “propensity to help”: PTH. If you find yourself, advertently or inadvertently, constantly subsuming your own goals in order to please others, consider these remedies: 1. Remember the airlines’ oxygen mask rule. You have to put your own on first if you are to help others. 2. If people refuse to help themselves, it’s unlikely you can really help them. Coaching should never become codependency. 3. Say “no” with conviction. Ask yourself what the “musts” are in your life (e.g., family time) and never sacrifice them for others’ minor requests.
Monday Morning Perspective: They say that the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure. — Ernest Hemingway (in “A Moveable Feast”)
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